Reaper Man (8 page)

“Couldn’t have you in the house anyway. It wouldn’t be right.”

T
HE BARN WILL BE QUITE ADEQUATE
, I
ASSURE YOU
.

“But you can come into the house for your meals.”

T
HANK YOU
.

“My name’s Miss Flitworth.”

Y
ES
.

She waited.

“I expect you have a name, too,” she prompted.

Y
ES
. T
HAT’S RIGHT
.

She waited again.

“Well?”

I’
M SORRY
?

“What is your name?”

The stranger stared at her for a moment, and then looked around wildly.

“Come on,” said Miss Flitworth. “I ain’t employing no one without no name. Mr…?”

The figure stared upward.

M
R
. S
KY
?

“No one’s called Mr. Sky.”

M
R
…. D
OOR
?

She nodded.

“Could be. Could be Mr. Door. There was a chap called Doors I knew once. Yeah. Mr. Door. And your first name? Don’t tell me you haven’t got one of those too. You’ve got to be a Bill or a Tom or a Bruce or one of those names.”

Y
ES
.

“What?”

O
NE OF THOSE
.

“Which one?”

E
R
. T
HE FIRST ONE
?

“You’re a Bill?”

Y
ES
?

Miss Flitworth rolled her eyes.

“All right, Bill Sky…” she said.

D
OOR
.

“Yeah. Sorry. All right, Bill Door…”

C
ALL ME
B
ILL
.

“And you can call me Miss Flitworth. I expect you want some dinner?”

I
WOULD
? A
H
. Y
ES
. T
HE MEAL OF THE EVENING
. Y
ES
.

“You look half starved, to tell the truth. More than half, really.” She squinted at the figure. Somehow it was very hard to be certain what Bill Door looked like, or even remember the exact sound of his voice. Clearly he
was
there, and clearly he had spoken—otherwise why did you remember anything at all?

“There’s a lot of people in these parts as don’t use the name they were born with,” she said. “I always say there’s nothing to be gained by going around asking pers’nal questions. I suppose you
can
work, Mr. Bill Door? I’m still getting the hay in off the high meadows and there’ll be a lot of work come harvest. Can you use a scythe?”

Bill Door seemed to meditate on the question for some time. Then he said, I
THINK THE ANSWER TO THAT IS A DEFINITE
“
YES
,” M
ISS
F
LITWORTH
.

Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler also never saw the sense in asking personal questions, at least insofar as they applied to him and were on the lines of “Are these things yours to sell?” But no one appeared to be coming forward to berate him for selling off their property, and that was good enough for him. He’d sold more than a thousand of the little globes this morning, and he’d had to employ a troll to keep up a flow from the mysterious source of supply in the cellar.

People loved them.

The principle of operation was laughably simple and easily graspable by the average Ankh-Morpork citizen after a few false starts.

If you gave the globe a shake, a cloud of little white snowflakes swirled up in the liquid inside and settled, delicately, on a tiny model of a famous Ankh-Morpork landmark. In some globes it was the University, or the Tower of Art, or the Brass Bridge, or the Patrician’s Palace. The detail was amazing.

And then there were no more left. Well, thought Throat, that’s a shame. Since they hadn’t technically belonged to him—although
morally
, of course,
morally
they were his—he couldn’t actually complain. Well, he
could
complain, of course, but only under his breath and not to anybody specific. Maybe it was all for the best, come to think of it. Stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap. Get ’em off your hands—it made it much easier to spread them in a gesture of injured innocence when you said “Who, me?”

They were really pretty, though. Except, strangely enough, for the writing. It was on the bottom of each globe, in shaky, amateurish letters, as if done by someone who had never seen writing before and was trying to copy some down. On the bottom of every globe, below the intricate little snowflake-covered building, were the words:

Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of Unseen University, was a shameless autocondimentor.
*
He had his own special cruet put in front of him at every meal. It consisted of salt, three types of pepper, four types of mustard, four types of vinegar, fifteen different kinds of chutney and his special favorite: Wow-Wow Sauce, a mixture of mature scumble, pickled cucumbers, capers, mustard, mangoes, figs, grated wahooni, anchovy essence, asafetida and, significantly, sulfur and saltpetre for added potency. Ridcully inherited the formula from his uncle who, after half a pint of sauce on a big meal one evening, had a charcoal biscuit to settle his stomach, lit his pipe and
disappeared in mysterious circumstances,
although his shoes were found on the roof the following summer.

There was cold mutton for lunch. Mutton went well with Wow-Wow Sauce; on the night of Ridcully senior’s death, for example, it had gone at least three miles.

Mustrum tied his napkin behind his neck, rubbed his hands together, and reached out.

The cruet moved.

He reached out again. It slid away.

Ridcully sighed.

“All right, you fellows,” he said. “No magic at Table, you know the rules. Who’s playing silly buggers?”

The other senior wizards stared at him.

“I, I, I don’t think we can play it anymore,” said the Bursar, who at the moment was only occasionally bouncing off the sides of sanity, “I, I, I think we lost some of the pieces…”

He looked around, giggled, and went back to trying to cut his mutton with a spoon. The other wizards were keeping knives out of his way at present.

The entire cruet floated up into the air and started to spin slowly. Then it exploded.

The wizards, dripping vinegar and expensive spices, watched it owlishly.

“It was probably the sauce,” the Dean ventured. “It was definitely going a bit critical last night.”

Something dropped on his head and landed in his lunch. It was a black iron screw, several inches long.

Another one mildly concussed the Bursar.

After a second or two, a third landed point down on the table by the Archchancellor’s hand and stuck there.

The wizards turned their eyes upward.

The Great Hall was lit in the evenings by one massive chandelier, although the word so often associated with glittering prismatic glassware seemed inappropriate for the huge, heavy, black, tallow-encrusted thing that hung from the ceiling like a threatening overdraft. It could hold a thousand candles. It was directly over the senior wizards’ table.

Another screw tinkled onto the floor by the fireplace.

The Archchancellor cleared his throat.

“Run?” he suggested.

The chandelier dropped.

Bits of table and crockery smashed into the walls. Lumps of lethal tallow the size of a man’s head whirred through the windows. A whole candle, propelled out of the wreckage at a freak velocity, was driven several inches into a door.

The Archchancellor disentangled himself from the remains of his chair.

“Bursar!” he yelled.

The Bursar was exhumed from the fireplace.

“Um, yes, Archchancellor?” he quavered.

“What was the meanin’ of
that
?”

Ridcully’s hat rose from his head.

It was a basic floppy-brimmed, pointy wizarding hat, but adapted to the Archchancellor’s outgoing lifestyle. Fishing flies were stuck in it. A very small pistol crossbow was shoved in the hatband in case he saw something to shoot while out jogging, and Mustrum Ridcully had found that the pointy bit was just the right size for a small bottle of Bentinck’s Very Old Peculiar Brandy. He was quite attached to his hat.

But it was no longer attached to him.

It drifted gently across the room. There was a faint but distinct gurgling noise.

The Archchancellor leapt to his feet. “Bugger
that
,” he roared. “That stuff’s nine dollars a fifth!” He made a leap for the hat, missed, and kept on going until he drifted to a halt several feet above the ground.

The Bursar raised a hand, nervously.

“Possibly woodworm?” he said.

“If there is any more of this,” growled Ridcully, “any more at all, d’you hear, I shall get very angry!”

He was dropped to the floor at the same time as the big doors opened. One of the college porters bustled in, followed by a squad of the Patrician’s palace guard.

The guard captain looked the Archchancellor up and down with the expression of one to whom the word “civilian” is pronounced in the same general tones as “cockroach.”

“You the head chap?” he said.

The Archchancellor smoothed his robe and tried to straighten his beard.

“I am the Archchancellor of this university, yes,” he said.

The guard captain looked curiously around the hall. The students were all cowering down the far end. Splashed food covered most of the walls to ceiling height. Bits of furniture lay around the wreckage of the chandelier like trees around ground zero of a meteor strike.

Then he spoke with all the distaste of someone whose own further education had stopped at age nine, but who’d heard stories…

“Indulging in a bit of youthful high spirits, were we?” he said. “Throwin’ a few bread rolls around that kind of thing?”

“May I ask the meaning of this intrusion?” said Ridcully, coldly.

The guard captain leaned on his spear.

“Well,” he said, “it’s like this. The Patrician is barricaded in his bedroom on account of the furniture in the palace is zooming around the place like you wouldn’t believe, the cooks won’t even go back in the kitchen on account of what’s happening in there…”

The wizards tried not to look at the spear’s head. It was starting to unscrew itself.

“Anyway,” the captain went on, oblivious to the faint metallic noises, “the Patrician calls through the keyhole, see, and says to me, ‘Douglas, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind nipping down to the University and asking the head man if he would be so good as to step up here, if he’s not too busy?’ But I can always go back and tell him you’re engagin’ in a bit of student humor, if you like.”

The spearhead was almost off the shaft.

“You listening to me?” said the captain suspiciously.

“Hmm? What?” said the Archchancellor, tearing his eyes away from the spinning metal. “Oh. Yes. Well, I can assure you, my man, that we are not the cause of—”

“Aargh!”

“Pardon?”

“The
spearhead
fell on my
foot
!”

“Did it?” said Ridcully, innocently.

The guard captain hopped up and down.

“Listen, are you bloody hocus-pocus merchants coming or not?” he said, between bounces. “The boss is not very happy. Not very happy at all.”

A great formless cloud of Life drifted across the Discworld, like water building up behind a dam when the sluice gates are shut. With no Death to take the life force away when it was finished with, it had nowhere else to go.

Here and there it earthed itself in random poltergeist activity, like flickers of summer lightning before a big storm.

Everything that exists, yearns to live. That’s what the cycle of life is all about. That’s the engine that drives the great biological pumps of evolution. Everything tries to inch its way up the tree, clawing or tentacling or sliming its way up to the next niche until it gets to the very top—which, on the whole, never seems to have been worth all that effort.

Everything that exists, yearns to live. Even things that are not alive. Things that have a kind of sub-life, a metaphorical life, an
almost
life. And now, in the same way that a sudden hot spell brings forth unnatural and exotic blooms…

There was something about the little globes. You had to pick them up and give them a shake, watch the pretty snowflakes swirl and glitter. And then take them home and put them on the mantelpiece.

And then forget about them.

The relationship between the University and the Patrician, absolute ruler and nearly benevolent dictator of Ankh-Morpork, was a complex and subtle one.

The wizards held that, as servants of a higher truth, they were not subject to the mundane laws of the city.

The Patrician said that, indeed, this was the case, but they would bloody well pay their taxes like everyone else.

The wizards said that, as followers of the light of wisdom, they owed allegiance to no mortal man.

The Patrician said that this may well be true but they also owed a city tax of two hundred dollars per head per annum, payable quarterly.

The wizards said that the University stood on magical ground and was therefore exempt from taxation and anyway you couldn’t put a tax on knowledge.

The Patrician said you could. It was two hundred dollars per capita; if per capita was a problem, de-capita could be arranged.

The wizards said that the University had never paid taxes to the civil authority.

The Patrician said he was not proposing to remain civil for long.

The wizards said, what about easy terms?

The Patrician said he was
talking
about easy terms. They wouldn’t want to know about the hard terms.

The wizards said that there was a ruler back in, oh, it would be the Century of the Dragonfly, who had tried to tell the University what to do. The Patrician could come and have a look at him if he liked.

The Patrician said that he would. He truly would.

In the end it was agreed that while the wizards of course paid no taxes, they would nevertheless make an entirely voluntary donation of, oh, let’s say two hundred dollars per head, without prejudice,
mutatis mutandis
, no strings attached, to be used strictly for non-militaristic and environmentally-acceptable purposes.

It was this dynamic interplay of power blocs that made Ankh-Morpork such an interesting, stimulating and above all bloody dangerous place in which to live.
*

Senior wizards did not often get out and about on what
Wellcome to Ankh-Morporke
probably called the thronged highways and intimate byways of the city, but it was instantly obvious that something was wrong. It wasn’t that cobblestones didn’t sometimes fly through the air, but usually someone had thrown them. They didn’t normally float by themselves.

A door burst open and a suit of clothes came out, a pair of shoes dancing along behind it, a hat floating a few inches above the empty collar. Close behind them came a skinny man endeavoring to do with a hastily-snatched flannel what normally it took a whole pair of trousers to achieve.

“You come back here!” he screamed, as they rounded the corner. “I still owe seven dollars for you!”

A second pair of trousers scurried out into the street and hurried after them.

The wizards clustered together like a frightened animal with five pointed heads and ten legs, wondering who was going to be the first to comment.

“That’s bloody amazing!” said the Archchancellor.

“Hmm?” said the Dean, trying to imply that he saw more amazing things than that all the time, and that in drawing attention to mere clothing running around by itself the Archchancellor was letting down the whole tone of wizardry.

“Oh, come
on
. I don’t know many tailors around here who’d throw in a second pair of pants for a seven dollar suit,” said Ridcully.